The Second Coming

Can the most alpha of males comfortably morph into a first lady?

In a pediatric AIDS ward at Robert Reid Cabral Children's Hospital in the Dominican Republic, a boy in blue overalls, about a year old, has pulled himself up to stand in his crib. He shows zero interest in the scrum of photographers in the corner, or in their clicking, flashing machines. Instead, he is staring at the other side of the room, with a focus not often exhibited by those who are not yet self-propelled, at the door through which Bill Clinton is about to enter.

He has stopped in the DR on his way to a six-day, four-country tour of Africa, traveling with members of the press and some Canadian fat cats who 've donated large sums to the William J. Clinton Foundation. But the toddler, younger than most of the forty-second president's neckties, doesn't understand any of that. What he knows, in some primal way, is that someone special is about to show up. When Clinton finally walks through the door, looking seven feet tall (as he often does), the child's face breaks into a giant grin, expectations met.

Bill Clinton has emerged from his presidential husk and found a post–White House role that fits: He travels the world fighting poverty, AIDS, and global warming.

The William J. Clinton Foundation is a labyrinthine tangle of projects, employing 800 people in 25 countries, with programs extending to more than 70 nations around the world. Its HIV/AIDS initiative, through which Clinton convinced pharmaceutical companies to lower the costs of their medicines, provides drugs for more than 750,000 people. The Clinton-Hunter Development Initiative, concerned with sustainable growth in Africa, is expanding access to clean water and sanitation, and improving farmers' access to fertilizer and irrigation systems. The Clinton Climate Initiative works with international banks to finance the reduction of carbon emissions in many of the world's largest cities. In the United States, Clinton's Alliance for a Healthier Generation has bargained with snack and beverage companies to get healthier food into schools.

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Judging by the reception he receives in the DR and in Africa—where they climb trees and sit on roofs and pull themselves up in their cribs to get a glimpse of the man—the ex-president might as well be the Second Coming. However, on his fifth annual summer trip to Africa, the future of this role is in question. Next year at this time, Clinton will likely be gearing up for the Democratic National Convention, preparing to appear in a capacity unprecedented in American history and in his life—as second banana to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female candidate for president. But when preverbal tots already get that you're the most interesting person in a room, how do you stopper that in the service of your wife's ascension to power? How do you get a little less Jesus and a little more Mary Magdalene?

It may be that by taking his show on the road and learning to ply the traditionally feminine art of giving (the title of his new book), Clinton has found an outlet for his stratospheric ambitions and thousand-watt personality, and an angle from which his light can flatter Hillary rather than outshine her. As he tells an audience at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, "She helped me in every race I ran from 1974 to 2000.... She did 27 years for me, and I've done seven years for her, so I've got about 20 years to go before we're even."

But "even" is a tricky proposition if you're Bill Clinton. He is the former leader of the free world, one of the most recognizable people on the planet, a man with articulate opinions on everything from crop diversification to prehistoric human migration to the fiction of Junot Díaz. In Africa, I'll learn that listening to Clinton is as much fun as I could hope to have in a day (let alone six). I'll also observe a brilliant personality for whom surrendering the spotlight will be a serious test of will.

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Having read stories about this annual Africa trip, I'd imagined us all flying together, one big "Oh Hell!"–playing, postpresidential family. But that's not in the cards this year. A dozen journalists and a handful of Clinton Foundation aides are aboard a large airplane loaned by a Canadian mining financier, while the former president is with the donors on an even larger jet loaned by a Google executive. As we wait to depart on the tarmac at Kennedy Airport, our disappointment is mitigated by our understanding that if Clinton were with us, my colleagues and I would be more self-conscious about reclining on couches and pawing through drawers on the swank aircraft. But the capering ceases when we spy Clinton's motorcade pulling up and watch him unfold from a black sedan. Even though he's almost too far away to see, even though I'm about to spend an entire week with him, I, like the toddler, cannot look away. The ex-president is just so presidential, so glinty in the sun.

I'd already spent years admiring (sometimes reviling, but mostly admiring) him. He is the first president I ever voted for, and that's the kind of thing that leaves a lasting impression on a girl. I'd also met him once, six years ago, at a political fundraiser when he was newly out of office, his mojo still cresting, and, like so many women (and men) before me, I'd been rendered rubber-legged by a simple handshake. He seemed to pulse with pheromones, and a moment's eye contact had been a sexually discombobulating experience. That feral appeal served Clinton well, and very badly, in his career. In an age of televised elections, charisma equals power, so while it was great that his brain was bigger than many to have rested on White House pillowcases, it was even greater that in a suit and tie, the guy could make Mick Jagger seem a little buttoned-up.

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However, sex appeal is not a quality we historically have sought in our First Ladies—the role for which Clinton is already auditioning. Illustrating this point while we are in Africa is a Washington Post story about former First Lady and current New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who has worn a blouse that gives the impression, by one zillionth of a millimeter, that she may, in fact, have breasts. First Ladies do not have breasts. They comfort and nurture and appear at foreign funerals in nubby wool suits.

But as I learn on day one of our trip, the va-va-voom of Clinton's touch has dissipated in the years since I first met him. In the lobby of the Robert Reid Hospital, the press gets caught in a throng, and as i try to push my way through the tangle of arms and legs, i feel a massive paw on my left shoulder blade, guiding me toward the door. Though I can't see who's behind me, I know before I even hear the familiar cotton-wool drawl tell the crowd to "Let them through" that that paw is the same one I shook six years earlier, half of the pair that clasped palms and forearms and elbows all the way to the White House, and that Hillary has written about noticing when they met at Yale law school in 1971. I know it's Clinton's—not because it sends a dangerous jolt down my spine, but because the instant I feel that huge hand on my back, I know that I am safe.

He is still an unreconstructed toucher: arms, shoulders, elbows; men, women, kids. It's just part of the hungry, physical way he connects to people. At one dinner, he throws an arm around me; the next night, he does the same thing to the guy on his right. Whether it's because of his age, or his health, or his wife's campaign, or perhaps just because he's on a trip with reporters, the Clinton who used to radiate a ravenous sensuality is now infused with something at once older and more boyish, something more...comforting and nurturing.

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"A First [Lady's]...power is derivative, not independent, of the President's," writes Hillary Rodham Clinton in her memoir, Living History. "[A]djusting to being a full-time surrogate was difficult for me." But adjust she did—surrendering her headbands, her last name, her career. She even penned First Lady–lite lit—such as Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets—to signal her submission to gender expectations.

Now, persuading Bill Clinton to curate a collection of letters to pets seems about as likely as turning one of the lions we will see at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania into the First House Cat. But in nature, it's the lionesses who are the killers, and at Ngorongoro, on our last day in Africa, Clinton will watch one of them rub out a warthog in front of his vehicle in a neat metaphor for what could happen in November 2008. He'll excitedly describe the lioness kill over lunch in the crater before beginning a disquisition on how Homo sapiens first emerged from near where we're currently sitting among Masai tribesmen, eating barbecue chicken at picnic tables, with zebras grazing in the near distance.

The surreal, weird beauty of that lunch prompts me to consider, and not for the first time this week, that Clinton may be well prepared to play his role in a social evolution—electing a woman president—that should be tiny in comparison to the miraculous trudge out of Africa and around the globe, but which has been unthinkable in more than two centuries of American history. Only a man so sure of his masculinity and power could be comfortable enough to give his wife a turn at the most public kind of supremacy.

We're a couple of days into the trip before he flies with us hacks, on the leg from Malawi to Zambia. Clinton ambles onto the plane and settles himself in one of the captain's chairs as we sit around him on the couches and at his feet, as if he were our favorite professor at the University of I Can't Believe I'm On a Private Plane with Bill Clinton.

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"I'm exhausted," he begins, in vast understatement. It's a wonder that he's still upright after a day that began at 6 a.m., when mechanical trouble stranded him on a Johannesburg runway. He had to ditch the donors and charter a private jet to the airport in Blantyre, Malawi, and from there take a chopper to Neno, a small village where, with physician Paul Farmer and philanthropist Tom Hunter, the Clinton Foundation is building a hospital. He'd loped wearily out of his helicopter to greet local wheat farmers, one of whom gave a lengthy address in Chichewa. I had watched as Clinton cocked his head and bit his lip; a muscle in his neck had pulsed as he gave the farmer the Full Clinton look of empathetic engagement. I'd wondered if that neck spasm wasn't also a stifled yawn. Still, he'd managed to ask the man about roads and storage facilities—he'd been paying attention. He walked through the village, spoke to ecstatic villagers, toured the hospital construction site, and talked with nurses and brick makers before clambering back onto the chopper.

Now, as we take off from Blantyre, Clinton's fourth flight of the day, en route to Lusaka, Zambia, it's hard to imagine that he has anything left for us. Then one of his aides sets aside a plate of cheese and crackers for him; he grabs a couple of samosas and begins to talk.

He talks about a guy he has just seen in Neno whom he originally met while jogging in Seattle in 1992. He talks about how many women in the village were making the ecofriendly bricks. He talks about ATM cards that can be activated by thumbprints. He grabs more samosas and talks about microcredit, the aggregate impact of the Grameen bank in Bangladesh, and eBay philanthropy. He eats a couple of skewers of chicken satay and continues, mentioning the Middle East peace plan, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and how, after the Mafia and the Russian mob, the Nigerian organized crime network is probably the biggest and most sophisticated in the world. He picks up a piece of Hawaiian pizza, accidentally drops it on the floor, picks it up again and puts it aside, then absentmindedly eats it anyway, while recounting the kidnapping and murder of Colombia's culture minister Consuelo Araújo, and describing the children's choir that sings in her honor.

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Sometimes, a sentence comes out of his mouth—for instance, "Incapacity is a bigger problem than corruption, and corruption usually follows incapacity"—that makes him sound like the love child of John Kenneth Galbraith and Yoda. Mostly, he is simply wide-eyed with exuberance for things about which you cannot imagine mustering wide-eyed exuberance. Explaining how if you give 10 percent of the people in a poor country a cell phone it will drive the GDP up six-tenths of one percent, Clinton says that after the 2004 South Asia tsunami, when the relief effort that he and George H.W. Bush headed put Indian and Sri Lankan fishermen back in business, "they had cell phones for the first time, and they could call to find out what the market prices were for fish, and nobody could shaft them anymore. Their income started going up—it was amazing!"

When the plane lands two hours later, Clinton is still talking, even though he's really wiped out now; he's rubbing a cup of hot coffee back and forth across his forehead, and he has made an uncharacteristic conversational slip—confusing Iraq and Afghanistan—which he immediately catches and corrects. But still he talks. As he stands and walks off the plane, he's jovial and sings a lyric from West Side Story: "Maria, I just met a girl named Maria...."

It's difficult not to feel gobsmacked by his capacious knowledge, the sheer volume of his verbiage, his ability to nimbly jump from subject to subject with such energy. His intellectual and humanistic appetites remain voracious, and when his gaze sweeps the dinner table and catches you, you feel as if you have been X-rayed by the eye of Sauron, the flabbiness of your own cerebrum exposed. Whenever this happens I am overcome by a desire to please the whirring brain, to nod in sage agreement and chuckle wryly at his declamations about the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement. And then a fear begins to prick at the back of my brain: the fear that he may never stop talking.

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As we're waiting to sit down at the first of several off-the-record dinners, I learn that I am to sit next to "the boss," as his aides all call him. I have to pee; a member of the Clinton team advises me to stay put. Clinton is walking through the door. I figure I'll hold it until there's a lull in conversation. Two hours later, I am nearing renal failure. Later at the hotel bar, Clinton pulls up a chair and chats with a half dozen people; he gets into a lengthy exchange with a young Clinton Foundation staffer. About an hour later, I see her barreling through the bar toward the ladies' room, hollering, "Oh, my God, I'm going to die!" One aide watches her go and concedes that in the early years, he couldn't bear to miss a word of the Clinton show either. "But at a certain point you have to be, like, Whatever, I can't live my life having to pee."

Bill Clinton is made of words, and if his capacity to push so many of them out in complete sentences with dependent clauses is mind-boggling, then so is the number of them that are devoted to his wife. It is rare to see a man married 32 years talk so much about his mate. While some of it is because Clinton likes to talk politics and his wife is the politician to talk about, many more of his references to her are in the vein of easy camaraderie born of long-term partnership. "Hillary always tells me..." "Hillary and I once knew these women..." "Hillary thinks I'm nuts, but..." They speak several times a day. On our last night in Africa, in a small hotel in Arusha, with a 4:30 a.m. wake-up call ahead of him, Clinton and his aides stay up all night so that he can call to wish Hillary luck and then watch her in the Democratic YouTube debate.

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In Africa, his seeming devotion to and investment in Hillary's future makes it hard to imagine that he'd do anything to jeopardize it, even though in certain political circles, guessing about whether he'll behave himself through the election is something of a parlor game. So say he did misbehave; would it nuke her campaign or administration? Certainly, it would produce a media storm. But would it provoke the shock—shock!—of 10 years ago? Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I doubt it. We've been through it and through it and through it with this guy, and we still like him. According to the polls and the pundits, we're liking his wife better, too.

I become increasingly convinced that in many ways the two are a perfectly matched pair, especially when Hillary Clinton tells me, weeks after our return from Africa, about how, as First Lady, she traveled the world and was "lucky enough to go into villages and barrios and sit down on the ground and talk to people about their lives, about things that make a difference, like microfinance." She sounds just like him! In Living History, she wrote, "Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971, and more than 30 years later we're still talking." (I bet she has to pee too.) The idea of them wonking-out together is draining but cheering. It's easy to forget after the past seven years that limber intellects are desirable in the leaders of your country.

As famous as he is for being long-winded, Clinton is even more famously late. At every hotel and every restaurant and on every tarmac, he pauses to press the flesh, and there's always so much to press. In Lusaka, mobs of students reach for him and cry, "We love you!" as we exit a restaurant; in Pugu, outside Dar es Salaam, where he's discussing new funding for malaria treatment, people rush around him, clogging the street. He cannot resist any of them. He wants to touch and sniff and snarfle them all right back, like an energetic Labrador who must greet every other pooch at the dog run. Left to his own devices, Clinton might happily dive in, mosh-pit style. When he seems to get lost in a sea of straining limbs and hands, it's up to the head of his Secret Service detail, Edna Perry, to grab the back of his pants and restrain him by the belt, a heartbreakingly Clintonian image if ever there was one.

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All the kibitzing is surely a habit he picked up in a lifetime of campaigning. But it's also the daily, inevitable way in which his eccentricities commingle: Clinton wants to be loved and he wants to show love back, and he wants to talk and think and hear stories from the people who love him so he'll have more to think and talk about with the next people he meets. It is a cycle that never ends, and his aides must constantly persuade him, through meaningful looks, coughs, interrupted conversations, and finally brute force, to move along. After I interview him in Lusaka, he asks me where I'm from. We've already gone over the allotted time, but when I say Philadelphia, he replies, "Philadelphia! Now that's an interesting town," in a tone that tells me he may be preparing a two-hour oration that begins with William Penn and ends with Rocky. His staff, a fraternity of young bucks, react fast, cutting off the conversation before it can start, and in the politest way possible, they remove me from the room and close the door.

These dedicated young men, whose brains, looks, and politics place them high on a scale my girlfriends and I used to call the Stephanopoulometer—and in notable contrast to the cadre of smart, hard-ass women Hillary gathered round her in the East Wing and who are now propelling her West—are the ex-president's card-playing buddies and occasional whipping boys; he clearly trusts and loves them. They do his advance work, control his public presentation, tend to his comforts, and revel in the proximity that allows them to tease him, to his face and behind his back. They love him, too.

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Clinton obviously enjoys, even needs, the company of youth. This may reflect his sometimes excruciating awareness of his own age, which is 61. Just three years ago, he underwent open-heart surgery and had a close brush with death. He looks great—trim and handsome and fit—but like most ex-presidents, he appears older than his years. And he knows it.

After touring the John Mitchell elementary schoolyard in Johannesburg, he addresses an auditorium full of kids who stomp and clap in unison for him. In the speech, he refers to himself as an "old gray-haired guy" and tells them that "those of us, like me, who have more yesterdays than we have tomorrows...owe it to you...to try to give you [a better] future."

He is quick to assure me that his sense of time running out is nothing to be alarmed about: "There is this subliminal terror of death that most people have. It's very different for me. My father died before I was born, so I never had the brooding fear of my own mortality."

Clinton says that it's his awareness of his inevitable demise that fills him with the impatient energy that sends him scooting around the world demanding action in his postpresidential years. As Paul Farmer says about the foundation's ventures in Malawi and Rwanda, Clinton refuses to hear that a project will take five years; he insists on two. "You gotta understand, I have now lived longer than my father, my stepfather, my grandfathers," Clinton says. "I was never morbid about it; I just [think] you never know how much time you have; you have to squeeze every second out of every minute, every minute out of every hour."

He also says he believes that "when you've lived over half your life, if you have any kind of conscience, you think more about people who've lived less than half of theirs. Particularly if you've had the kind of life I've had. A great life."

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As his wife tells me, "He'd go crazy if he was not helping people. He's been doing it his entire life."

So in his postpresidency, Clinton is holding babies, visiting sick kids, listening to stories of sexual assault, worrying about maternal health—work that has historically been marked as soft and feminized.

"I never believed that those so-called soft power issues were unimportant," he says. "I always thought that [it was important] when Hillary did it; and Eleanor Roosevelt did the same thing all during the Depression." Clinton's favorite First Ladies acted as eyes and ears for their presidents, extending the personal reach of the Oval Office, tending to the international relationships that their husbands did not have time to focus on.

"I didn't want Africa or India to believe I didn't care about them just because I couldn't physically go there in my first term," he says. So Clinton sent his wife in his stead. In some ways, he's still catching up to her. The reason we go to Ngorongoro is because Hillary and Chelsea loved it back in 1997; Bill has been wanting to get there ever since.

Perhaps he's been wanting to get there in ways that are not simply geographic. When I ask Senator Clinton if she sees any of her own duties as First Lady mirrored in her husband's foundation work, she says, "I do, and he's even said that on a few occasions." While her husband was in office, Clinton visited people in 82 countries. "I think that he was a little bit sorry, being president, about not having that kind of opportunity," she says. "It's important that the United States be represented not only in the halls of parliament and Congress, but where people live and work. I think this is a way to try to make up for lost time."

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If he envied her role back then, it sounds like he'll enjoy what's in store for him should she become president. "Given the damage that's been done by this administration," says Hillary, asked to speculate about what she might have Bill do should she occupy the Oval Office, "he will play a major role in helping to repair relations around the world."

When he finally went to Africa himself in 1998, becoming the first American president to make an extended visit to the continent, Clinton reaped the benefits of having dispatched an earlier avatar. He describes meeting with Senegalese women who had previously talked with Hillary about their opposition to genital mutilation. "They saw America as actually caring about what happened to people like them, because Hillary had been there and met with them and encouraged and supported them," Clinton says. "Derivatively, they loved me and America."

He also fondly remembers the "brave men" who accompanied the women to their meeting with him. He says, in admiration, "These few hardy guys there were so proud of themselves that they had been sticking up for these women and taking all this crap from the other guys, you know?"

Taking crap from other guys is something Clinton is going to have to get used to quickly. Already some of Hillary's presumptive Republican opponents are getting their jollies by making silly, sissifying cracks about their wives being prettier, better First Ladies than Bill.

And the festival of emasculation is just beginning. A New York magazine cover story recently featured an image of the former president in drag, and opened with the question of whether he would hold the Bible at his wife's inauguration. Why wouldn't he? In Living History, Hillary writes about how moving this precise moment of role reversal felt at a ceremony for her Senate inauguration. The leering speculation amplifies how embarrassingly inconceivable such moments remain—and how hard a time we're going to give the people trying to make them happen. The senator, predictably, tells me she's not perturbed by the prospect of her husband's inevitable spaying: "We've been at this for a pretty long time," she says. "I don't believe that anything that is said will come as a surprise."

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Whatever his issues with women, Clinton seems to stand apart from many men on the American left who talk the talk but cannot walk the walk next to broads more powerful than they. Yes, he joked to Jon Stewart in September, "I may slit my throat," when asked if he could handle trading places with his wife.

But when I ask Hillary if she thinks Bill would have a difficult time adjusting to a position of derivative power, she says, "I can't imagine a better partner. Obviously, this is my campaign and this would be my presidency; neither of us would expect it to be any different. But I will count on him to be there for me just as I was there for him."

And a week in Africa leads me to believe that he is genuinely unthreatened by the idea. I ask him if he can conceive of inheriting the legacy of Hillary and Eleanor.

"Yeah!" he replies. "And I wouldn't be ashamed to do it, either. I'd be proud of it."

I fill in the as-yet-unnamed job title with a shorthand "First Whatever." This cracks him up. "That may be what I use!" he says to his aides. "Maybe that should be my title! I've been a mystery to myself for most of my life!"

By fashioning himself an ambassador of concerned charisma and ensuring that his efforts make headway and headlines around the world, Clinton has muscularized soft diplomacy, putting his alpha-male stamp on a feminized philanthropic arena. In doing so, he has cast himself as the world's most appealing, and most testosteronefueled, First Whatever-in-waiting. It's perfect. He and Hillary have always been classic American meritocrats; they want power and the results that power brings. This work, in which he can hold in his hand the medicines that save babies and touch the walls of the schools that will educate them and the hospitals that will treat them, allows him to do all that he must to keep on being Bill Clinton—zooming around on planes and talking to people and squeezing every minute out of every hour. At the Mandela Foundation, Clinton tells a woman who asks him about his role in a Hillary White House, "I would do whatever I was asked to do, but I hope I won't have to give up my foundation for her."

Can Hillary see him keeping the gig through her presidency? "Absolutely," she says. One of the contributions Americans make is through non-governmental organizations. And what Bill has done takes it to another level that is complementary to what our government should be doing."

In Africa, Bill Clinton and his staff talk constantly about how they don't want to just give blindly, but also "create systems" that can work into the future. Clinton seems to have created a system that will allow him to remain potent even as he bolsters his wife's growing power.

"My wife was my first role model for what it means to be a public servant without public office," he writes in the introduction to Giving, a book that includes one photo in its pages: a picture of a Cambodian baby boy with HIV whose life has been saved, at least for now, by drugs provided by the Clinton Foundation. Around his tiny face are cupped two enormous hands. Those hands—the ones that signed the bills, shook the hands, seduced the woman with whom he is trying to make more history—are Bill Clinton's most outward signifier of power and masculinity. Here they are, in maternal soft focus, protecting the vulnerable head of an infant.

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